Every Classical Sicilian player has a 6.Bg5 file. Ask them to meet it and the answers come quickly, deeply, with confidence. Then White plays 6.Be2, or 6.Bc4, or 6.Be3, or 6.f3 — and the same well-prepared player is suddenly improvising.
These are "sidelines" only because most preparation ignores them, not because they're harmless. Meet one unprepared and the game doesn't crash — it drifts. A natural move here, a slightly worse structure there, until you're defending something you expected to enjoy.
Part of the difficulty is that these tries don't share a single character. 6.Be2 invites a slow, restrained middlegame; 6.Bc4 plants the bishop on Black's most sensitive diagonal; 6.Be3 and 6.f3 point toward the sharp, opposite-side race of English Attack structures. One block of memorized theory was never going to hold them all together, and that is the problem GM Rodrigo Vasquez set out to solve.
He isn't offering new theory to be memorized. He's sharing this material the way he teaches it to his own students — through complete model games, where the plans, the recurring structures, and Black's concrete resources unfold move by move.
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The Scotch Game took its name from a correspondence match played in 1824 between the chess clubs of Edinburgh and London, where the Scottish side struck in the centre with 3.d4. It was a fixture of nineteenth-century play before slipping quietly out of fashion. Then Garry Kasparov brought it back to the very top, wheeling it out in World Championship play and reminding everyone that an early central strike still carries real venom.
That is the spirit GM Mitrabha Guha builds on in The Scotch Game: A Modern Repertoire for White. After 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4, White challenges Black in the centre at once and plays for active pieces from the very first moves — no slow manoeuvring, no waiting for a plan to arrive.
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2h 48m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests Computer Practice
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Around 1610, the Italian master Giulio Cesare Polerio set down a knight sacrifice so violent that his countrymen named it after what it left on the board: the Fegatello, the "fried liver." Four centuries later, the same leap onto f7 is still one of the most direct ways to drag Black's king into the open. And the wider 4.Ng5 attack, rather than being refuted by modern engines, has been re-armed by them.
The move that sets it all in motion, 4.Ng5, looks almost like a beginner's lunge. That is exactly its value. From that moment every line revolves around a single square, f7, and Black is forced to solve concrete problems from the very first moves.
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The Caro-Kann has spent most of its life being praised for the wrong thing. Solid. Sound. Structurally impeccable. All true — and all of it has left the opening with a reputation as the defence you choose when a draw would do. GM Abdulla Gadimbayli picked it up for precisely the opposite reason.
He is candid about how he arrived there. A grandmaster from Azerbaijan rated 2524, he spent much of his career struggling for a reliable answer to 1.e4 — and his style, by his own account, has never leaned towards solid games. For a long time the answer was 1...e6. Then he turned to 1...c6, and found something he had not expected: an opening offering an unusual number of ways for Black to play for the win. This course is the result of that work, and his first for Modern Chess.
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Aron Nimzowitsch built a whole way of playing on one unsettling idea: invite your opponent to advance, then turn that advance into a weakness. The Sicilian line that carries his name follows exactly this logic. After 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nf6, Black provokes 3.e5 and then goes to work against it with ...e6 and ...d6.
In The Underrated Nimzowitsch Sicilian - Complete Repertoire for Black, GM Alexey Dreev presents this as one of the most underestimated answers to 1.e4 — a line he calls a personal favorite. He has trusted it in his own games against Caruana and Matlakov, and the course is written in his first-person voice, with GM Pier Luigi Basso as co-author.
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Few openings carry a pedigree quite like this one. The Evans Gambit was conceived in 1827 by William Davies Evans, a Welsh sea captain, and every attacking generation since has reached back for it — Morphy and Chigorin in the romantic era, and later Kasparov, who reintroduced it at the highest level against Anand in 1995. It is one of those ideas that never truly retires; each generation rediscovers its bite and adds something of its own.
That is exactly what GM Baadur Jobava and GM Pier Luigi Basso do here. The gambit's logic is unchanged since 1827: after 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.b4, White hands over a pawn to gain time on the bishop, build a broad centre with c3 and d4, and open lines straight toward f7. What is new is the modern, engine-tested precision the authors bring to it — including a fresh queenside idea in the main line that gives the whole system a second life.
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1h 51m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests
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For most of the Steinitz's history, 5.f4 was the main move. It was where White claimed the most space, and where every French player braced for the main fight. That has quietly changed. Modern theory has worked the 5.f4 lines out so concretely that White struggles to prove anything real — and a second front has opened at 5.Nce2, the positional try where understanding matters more than memory. Part 1 of GM Andrea Stella's Steinitz answers both, and treats them as two different problems needing two different kinds of preparation.
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This course presents a practical Ruy Lopez repertoire based on the Modern Archangel variation (4...Bc5), as employed by GM Praggnanandhaa. Offering a sound alternative to the theory-heavy Berlin and Marshall lines, the system follows a clear strategic blueprint: bishop to a7, knight via e7 to g6, and the thematic ...Bb4+ check to disrupt White's center. GM Sina Movahed covers all critical responses, providing a double-edged yet reliable repertoire where understanding plans and typical maneuvers matters far more than memorizing endless variations.
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For decades, the Italian Game has been an awkward place to be as Black. The quiet maneuvering plans and the many move orders leave plenty of room to drift, and it is easy to end up passively placed with no clear idea. Movahed's answer sidesteps the heavily analyzed main lines that follow 4...Nf6. After 3...Bc5 he meets 4.c3 with the flexible 4...d6, lets White build the center with d4, and only then drops the bishop back to b6 — giving up a pawn to seize the initiative before White can consolidate.
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The Ruy Lopez is usually White's kind of fight. After 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5, the familiar roads lead to slow, deeply mapped positions where White keeps the tension and sets the pace, while Black spends the middlegame answering questions rather than asking them.
The modest-looking 3...g6 changes that on move three. Black declares the character of the game at once: fianchetto the bishop, aim it down the long diagonal at White's centre, and head for an unbalanced struggle where the full point is a genuine target for both sides. As Pier Luigi Basso frames it in the introduction, this is a way to fight the Spanish and play for a complicated game — not to equalise quietly, but to reach positions with rich play for either side.
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2h 30m PGN Download Memory Booster Interactive Tests
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